Number 60
I've mentioned this subject before (PO 16), and yet, inexplicably, nothing has been done: I refer to the habit of using the present tense to describe past events in the news or history narratives. Example: A TV documentary on the story of Cain and Abel was delivered almost entirely in the present tense, and it got confusing. "Cain had been condemned to wander the earth . . . he builds a city." The past perfect (had been condemned) ought to have been followed by the simple past (he built). Of course, why the writer even bothered to use the past when he could have used the present (Cain is condemned) isn't clear. This continuous present tense is a bad literary device but at least writers who can't help themselves ought to follow an internal logic.
I don't really like the word "author" as a synonym for "writer" although I use it often enough. It comes from the same root as "authority" and although the meaning "writer" is in dictionaries now, I always think of the root meaning of "creator" or "originator." For example, as the late Albert Warfield (you wouldn't know him) used to say, "God is not the author of confusion."
I really, really don't like it as a verb ("She authored a bestseller"). But even as a noun, it's imprecise, like calling someone an "artist." What kind of artist? Sculptor, painter, candlestick maker?
As is often the case, when I feel a twinge about a usage, www.yourdictionary.com has a pertinent usage note.
The verb "author," which had been out of use for a long period, has been rejuvenated in recent years with the sense "to assume responsibility for the content of a published text." As such it is not quite synonymous with the verb "write;" one can write, but not author, a love letter or an unpublished manuscript, and the writer who ghostwrites a book for a celebrity cannot be said to have "authored" the creation. The sentence "He has authored a dozen books on the subject" was unacceptable to 74 percent of the Usage Panel, probably because it implies that having a book published is worthy of special lexical distinction, a notion that sits poorly with conventional literary sensibilities and seems to smack of press agentry. The sentence "The Senator authored a bill limiting uses of desert lands in California" was similarly rejected by 64 percent of the Panel, though here the usage is common journalistic practice and is perhaps justified by the observation that we do not expect that legislators will actually write the bills to which they attach their names. The use of "author" as a verb in computer-related contexts is well established and unexceptionable.
(It's not clear to me, by the way, how one could "write, but not author, a love letter or an unpublished manuscript"? Plagiarism can occur in any genre. Ghostwriting, of course, clearly distinguishes the laborer from the source of material.)
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